The research team assembled an unprecedented dataset on mortality from 29 countries, spanning most of Europe, the US and Chile — countries for which official death registrations for 2020 had been published.
It took on average 5.6 years for these countries to achieve a one-year increase in life expectancy recently, while the progress was wiped out over the course of 2020 by Covid-19, they said.

The largest declines in life expectancy were observed among males in the US, who saw a decline of 2.2 years relative to 2019 levels, followed by Lithuanian males (1.7 years), they said.